Nobel America: Home of the immigrant laureates

Yet another Nobel season is upon us, and yet again, watercooler talk around many scientific and academic institutions across the world is whether American domination of the Prize is coming to an end. This has been predicted for some years now, with Chinese and Indians expected to muscle into what has been a western, and particularly American, domain. But the evidence and the trend are both spotty. Two Americans have shared this year’s Chemistry Nobel, and the Physics prize has been shared by an American and a Moroccan living in France. The Medicine prize has been shared by a Briton and a Japanese scholar living in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the Literature Nobel has gone to a Chinese writer; but in any case, Americans haven’t dominated this writerly prize as much as they have with the sciences. The last American to win the Literature Nobel, among only ten Americans to do so, was Toni Morrison in 1993. This year’s Peace Nobel has gone to the European Union not that this was American bailiwick either . Among the score of American Nobel Peace Prize winners, four were Presidents whose record of peacemaking was dodgy at best. They include Barack Obama, whose specialty is ending war rather than bringing about peace.

Jimmy Carter won in 2002, some two decades after his Presidency, whose policy of sucking the Russians into Afghanistan to avenge Vietnam, on the advice of his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezhinski, would result in the demise of the Soviet Union but later bring grief to America. George Marshall was awarded the 1953 Peace Prize for reconstruction of Europe after he helped in its destruction as a military leader. Henry Kissinger was given the prize jointly in 1974 with Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, but the award was so discredited that the co-winner declined to accept it, saying he did not see any peace resulting from their effort. That leaves civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King, father of the Green Revolution Dr Norman Borlaug, and former vice-president and environmental evangelist Al Gore, as some of the more deserving winners.

In the sciences though, America rocks and rules, even now. It is estimated that Americans have won 47 per cent of the total Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences, medicine, and economics since its inception. If you take the Nobel Prize and the Olympics medal tally as two key metrics of success, it is hard to challenge the oft-repeated proposition — ridiculed by its own domestic critics — that America is the greatest nation on earth. Yes, China is catching up, but it is still a distant second and has a long way to go, particularly in the sciences. India is an occasional blip.

There’s another angle to this Nobel niche, which we in India discovered a few years back. It is possible that the ethnicity of the winner is Indian or Japanese or Moroccan, but his or her affiliation at the time of winning can be United States (as it was with several “Indian” winners including Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Subramanyam Chandrashekhar, and Hargobind Khorana ). So, in the years to come we could have plenty of winners of Chinese and Indian ethnicity , but whose nationality and/or affiliation is American. In that sense, the United States will continue to dominate the Prize thanks to it being the magnet for the best brains in the world.

But why is the Nobel so coveted? Maybe because it is one of the oldest prizes with lot of history and vintage attached to it. Every year, there is immense speculation in the specialty areas about the possible winners. It also has its share of lore and oddities. For instance, there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, and the unfounded story is that it is because the prize founder Alfred Nobel’s wife ran away with a mathematician (total bunkum; Nobel never married. Maybe it was a girlfriend, then?).

Of course, there are Nobel equivalent prizes for mathematics such as the Fields Medal (that sounds so ordinary) and the Abel Prize, which carries as much award money as the Nobel. In 2007, the Abel Prize was awarded to S R Srinivasa Vardhan “for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviation.” Never heard of Srinivasa Vardhan? See what I mean about the allure of the Nobel Prize? Vardhan was born in India, but was affiliated to New York University.

At the risk of upsetting my Indian readers, I think it is just as well that America continues to dominate the Nobel Prizes, even though, ideally, nationality or ethnicity should not be of any consequence in this matter. Probably because it has such a long tradition of winning, there is a certain unaffectedness about Americans who win the Nobel.

They simply go about their business after a day or two of interviews (usually in specialty journals in their field) and rarely appear on TV or tours. Washington itself doesn’t beat its chest and there is not even the pro-forma phone call from the President.

In fact, the United States is the only country which taxes Nobel Prize winnings (40 per cent) and no one makes a song and dance about it. Can you imagine what a circus we’d make if any of our home-grown scholars win? Well, on the flip side, maybe if enough of them won over a long period of time, we’d also learn to handle it sans hysteria. That day is still some distance away.